Marco Shuttle

Marco Shuttle

Italian-born producer Marco Shuttle has had quite a career – having been involved in dance music in his hometown of Treviso since the age of 15, he’s since gone on to house his singular output on the likes of Bunker, Clone, and his own imprint Eerie whilst simultaneously achieving a Fashion Design MA at Central St. Martins.

More recently he became the first producer to notch up a release on Donato Dozzy’s Spazio Disponibile besides Dozzy himself, a move he followed up in May with the hypnotic Systhema LP, an accomplished long player replete with meditative cuts like Olga.

Shuttle’s Crack Mix is an atmospheric affair that builds from swirling dub techno to something altogether more fierce. Check it out below along with a short Q&A.

Marco Shuttle appears at Freqs of Nature, 5-11 July

How has your past in fashion / visual art inspired selections and productions?

I think our taste in music is very much related to our taste in general. The music I play and make is very much an expression of taste; it has to do with aesthetics more than anything else. Having a strong background in design and fashion has made me more aware and in control of this connection, and strengthened the coherency of my sound aesthetics. We often refer to music in a visual way using adjectives like “elegant”, “beautiful” or “visionary”… or at least I do.

My response to sound goes through a similar, more or less conscious process than my response to the visual. As an artist and DJ I make decisions about it with a similar approach. Both sound and design are very much about proportions, balance, texture, weight, so it’s about dealing with the same elements in different playgrounds.

Tell us a little bit about the mission of your Eerie imprint

Eerie was initially born as a platform for me to release my own music with more freedom and to be more in control of it, then as I also started collaborating more or less regularly with other labels I suddenly had space to feature other artists. But the first urge was for me to find a home for my own output.

I consider it very much an artist’s label. I don’t have a pre-planned release schedule. I release quite little, only music that I’m completely in love with and only when I come across it.

Although the label is mostly about deep, dark and slightly unsettling music, it has so far built up a very eclectic discography and all the releases are very different from each other. This somehow reflects very much what I do when I perform as DJ, as I range through a lot of very different music in my sets.

Another main purpose of the label has so far been to work with artists that are not too much “known”. Some of them are more now, but I’ve never felt the urge to have big names in the roster apart from Anxur – the collab project of myself and Dozzy’s which is a standalone project of the two of us.

Can you tell us a little more about the mix? What was the idea behind it?
It was recorded in my house and studio in Berlin. After my last published mix, which was completely experimental, I wanted to do something techno but that somehow would show also the more leftfield side of my idea of it.

It’s divided into three parts. The first part is a long and ambient leaning intro, followed by a slow paced dubby bit that merges into the final more upbeat part. It’s partly inspired by my last show at De School in Amsterdam, where I played for five hours starting at very beginning and that had a similar structure.